Round Robin

Against the darkness the moon shown brightly. It was then that Adolph felt the transformation of his body.

With a cracking cry Adolph ripped
the shirt off his burning chest. Puberty, it seemed, had begun.

Adolf's fate was sealed!
There was nothing left to do but grow the stash he was destined to wear.

                Artist(s) Statement 

In the early 1920’s, a new surge of art overcame the aesthetic world. In a hodgepodge of dreamlike, nonsensical images, surrealism was born. The point of surrealist art was to challenge convention-- it represented an uncomfortable deviance from reality. As this art form developed, a parlor game developed along with it. Sitting in their vintage suits, surrealist artists drew a bit of a picture, hid all but the very bottom, and passed it on to another artist to continue. The result was usually grotesque, and always fascinating. An Exquisite Corpse-- a mixture of different artists’ ideas and images that couldn’t quite fit together in a homogeneous form. In an attempt to recreate our own form of this surrealist experiment, we passed snapshots of stories through our round robin of creativity. The resulting stories were just as fascinating as the results of the 1920’s parlor game.

Very early on in the process, we had to surrender our stories. We watched our initial snapshot twist into a jumbled mess of other people’s creative flows. After we got over the initial shock of losing control, however, the process became something beautiful. We “...enjoyed the mesmerizing flow of fragments” (Paul D. Miller, “Totems Without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse”). The beauty of our combined creative flows helped us create our hodgepodge of nonsense. That hodgepodge, however, was the point of this whole exercise. When our stories made the least amount of sense, doors of creativity opened in our minds. Suddenly making sense didn’t matter. Fitting a mold didn’t matter. Our “flow of fragments” turned into a pure example of our own freed thought processes and creativity.

Our project process represents something beyond stories-- it represents the world’s creative process on a microscopic scale. Everybody works so differently, sees so differently, processes so differently, that every bit of art is subject to billions of unique perspectives. We may never create anything completely original, but we create things that are uniquely our own. Nobody will be able to copy the intrinsic meaning we assign to our own art, just as we will never understand exactly what somebody else’s art means. All of the art in this world comes from this individual synthesis of our surroundings. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí worked together on the 1929 film “Un Chien Adalou”, resulting in a nonsensical representation of their dreams in art form. They didn’t come up with anything new, they just came up with their own interpretation of the information they had.

The tenuous strings of narratives we created illustrate the simple, beautiful fact of our diversity. We work so differently, see so differently, process so differently… Isn’t it amazing how individual our worlds are? How we are able to come up with such a unique synthesis of our surroundings? Our stories are barely interconnected, overflowing with our ideas and interpretations and information. We may not have made sense in our exquisite corpse storyboards, but we did make something-- and that, ultimately, is what matters.

Music Mosaic

Winter Berries.

We are blind, our eyes work as they should, but we don’t see what is around us, our eyes are set on a screen and we rarely contemplate what the world has for us. 

The reading “seeing” talks about someone who wanted to abandon her blindness. In the same way, I wanted to see things with a new set of eyes. While listening music and letting my mind wander I started to see colors and then everything was just a meaningless combination of figures. Then I found a tree with red winter berries, and the meaningless figures transformed into a series of images. 

This series of photographs were inspired by the song ‘Atomos I’ by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, these are 12 selected images from a vast amount of photos that were inspired by this song.

The music starts with a slow stillness, at first, it feels some somewhat unintelligible. The first image represents the beginning of the creative process, that eventually takes the form.

The first part of the song makes me think about Nature, most of the trees and flowers grow with no human intervention, then we start building and invading the natural space with man made constructions.

Music always brings feelings, and this song, in particular, makes me feel contemplative, but at the same time, the song becomes a story. It doesn't have any words, but it feels like a narration. When the strings start playing the story develops, I see winter berries and all kinds of berries, I wonder how humans figured out which fruits were good and then I think about God and the story continues developing.

It is hard to describe the process of creativity, many ideas come and go, they evolve. As Annie Dillard explained in the reading, we start seeing things and they are not necessarily ordered, they seem random but somewhat connected. Like branches on a tree, our thoughts spread and create fruit, sweet berries.

Atomos I (Spotify)
Atomos I (Youtube)

Savaged

The survival story of Hugh Glass on The Revenant (2015) directed by the 2014 Academy Award winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Offers a new look on Glass’ legendary quest through the American Frontier, after being attacked by a grizzly and left for dead by his company. While the movie covers Hugh Glass’ journey, it also makes a comment on racism and colonialism and even immigration. It is not the first time that Iñarritu talks about serious and sometimes politically charged topics, films such as Babel(20006) and Biutiful(2010) are a clear example of that.

In The Revenant,  Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, is in the middle of two worlds, he is an English speaker American with a Pawnee son. In this period of time and in the context they lived, it was hard to be a mixed raced boy. John Fitzgerald an American member of Glasses’ company is the one who likes to speak his mind about the mixed raced boy and his father, making it uncomfortable for everyone in the company. The words that DiCaprio’s character says to his son are a strong comment on racism: “They don't hear your voice! They just see the color of your face.”

Racism and colonialism are two topics that can be uncomfortable for audiences, that is because, unfortunately, both topics are alive and well. They might have changed in shape or name, but they are still present in today's society.

In the Revenant, the spectator may think at first that the Arikara tribe are the ‘bad guys’ because they take the pelts from the Americans who worked hard to get them. But the reason behind the Arikaras taking those pelts was to trade them for horses and weapons, and with those, find the daughter of one of the Arikara leaders who was kidnapped by a group of white men.

In a not so subtle way the movie addresses the topic of colonialism, one of the most obvious dialogues about this, is when the leader of the Arikara, Elk Dog, is trying to get the French to honor their word, and give them weapons and horses in exchange of the pelts they took from the Americans. Jones, the Frenchman, tells Elk Dog; “Those pelts are stolen” to which Elk Dog replies: “You all have stolen everything from us. Everything! The land. The animals...”

Society today, as refined and civilized as it seems to be, has the same difficulties that it had in 1823.Companies are still trying to get more money by exploiting resources and buying cheap lands from Developing World Countries, employers are still trying to get cheap labor, and of course, we are still discussing immigration. We do live in a better place, our conflicts are not solved by the use of force (most of the time), arrows and rifles have been replaced by meetings and treaties. We now have mass destruction weapons and more powerful rifles, but, we have not yet completely destroyed one another, which is a win.

It is important to point out that The Revenant film is very neutral in the way it portraits the Native and white Americans, they both have their faults but they are both in a quest to save their people. In a more personal way, they are both fighting for their families.

Who is the real Owner of the Land?

The beautiful cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki heightens the fact that, in the end, human beings can’t claim the land as their own. We are not the real owners of the world. The natural beauty of the landscapes and the way they are captured make nature one of the most important characters of the film, and the only one who truly applies justice. In the eyes of Nature, men are all the same, no matter what color they are or what language they speak, they all have to suffer the extreme cold of the mountains and cross the unforgivable rivers.

After almost dying because of his wounds, Glass finds a Native American, they both eat together and  Hikuc, the native, takes care of Glass. In a heartbreaking scene, Glass finds Hikuc hanging from a tree with a sign that reads ‘savage’ but, who is the real savage? Is it the one who helped his fellow men or the one who hung it from a tree?.

All of this combined elements make the film so much more than just a story about revenge and survival, it  talks about our condition as human beings. Hugh Glass’ journey becomes our journey, and just like the protagonist we come to the realization that we have to share the world and leave the higher matters to the Creator.